Misogyny in Brave New World

I believe the way Huxley portrays and treats the female population reflects the inequalities in gender and misogyny in the early 20th century society which the novel was written in. I have read and analysed articles on this matter and have found them to all generally agree with my hypothesis. One thing I have found interesting is that I have found no articles written before the 1990’s on the gender issue in Brave New World. This could show how only recently it is becoming apparent to us in our society of a gender bias. Another important thing to note is that not all the critical essays I read were written by women; David Leon Higdon wrote a compelling article which proves that the misogyny and inequality in Brave New World is not something that takes a female feminist activist to point out. I have also read two other articles written by female authors, one being an anonymous UK student, and the other June Deery. For the most part, I wholly agreed with the points they made about the gender bias in Huxley’s work. Lenina, a vaccination worker and lover of John the Savage, is seemingly denied a role of a rebel by Huxley in Brave New World. For example, near the beginning of the book, Lenina’s behaviour is rather unorthodox. She wears green, instead of the grey or maroon uniform which she is expected to wear as an alpha or beta (which particular one, we are not told).

Instead of conforming to the society’s conventions of freely having casual sex with anyone, she exclusively dates one particular man for weeks on end. David Leon Higdon makes a significant point on this topic: “Rather than confronting, developing, and enabling her rebellion, Huxley’s text takes revenge on her and virtually humiliates her back into the confines of the systems. It callously violates her characterisation in the early chapters.” After reading his article, I realised how true this statement was. Lenina was built up with the potential to have a strong rebellious role in the book; but come Chapter Four, she becomes only a narrative feeder to help explain important facts about the utopia to the reader. One example of this is when Lenina asks Henry, “Why do the smoke stacks have those things like balconies around them?” to which Henry – of course a male character – replies with the explanation. Higdon writes, “I believe he was so blinded by his misogyny that he created a character at odds with his text who resisted fitting comfortably into the fable of the text”. This is a very strong and noteworthy opinion by Higdon, and one I definitely agree with. Lenina had so much potential to be a lead rebellious character in the story.

However, oblivious to how unfairly he was treating this female charcter, Huxley had denied her a role which he had saved for only male characters – a role presumably he thought only a male character would be strong enough to handle. It seems to be that women are not given any positions of power at all within the text, rebellion or not. First and foremost, all the people of authority in the novel are male. There is one woman, Miss Keate, who as a principal holds a level of power over students – but oddly in a society with no marriage Huxley has taken away her first name, part of her identity. As June Deery puts it, “Perhaps Huxley has forgotten this in his desire to recreate the stereotype of the spinsterish headmistress, the woman who achieves position only by forfeiting her ‘true femininity’.” Again, another reflection of a stereotype, a gender bias of Huxley’s time. She also notes, “When it is a question of possessing knowledge or having an education, once again it is the men who appear to be in a superior position.” This is an important point; we never read of women studying, going to school, receiving an education. However we do read of men learning and researching; in fact, the book opens to a group of boys being given a tour and learning about the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.

This is such a crucial concept for Huxley to disregard. How could he possibly have tried to create a utopia and overlooked giving the females in his world an education? I know that all children (regardless of gender) in 1920’s USA were required to go to school by law; I find it hard to believe Huxley had just ‘forgotten’ to include females being educated as well as males in Brave New World. In Brave New World, Huxley had attempted to create a utopia, the ‘perfect world’. Yet his fictional universe is severely destabilised by the way he treats the females in his work. “In some instances, Huxley both recognises the bias in the system and explicitly condemns it, but in other instances it is a function of his own perspective and he is oblivious to the inequalities his illustration introduces.” June Deery’s comment here is highly relevant, and I cannot agree more. For example, it is the men who ask women out on dates, and the men who drive around women in helicopters. The subtle inequality continues as we read of men chewing sex hormone chewing gum and talking about different women as sexual partners, but there is no record of women chewing this gum or talking about men in the same way.

This is odd, as Huxley had attempted to create a utopia hundreds of years into the future, where women are assumed to be equal to men. Yet this is not so. The double-standards in his writing are reminiscent of the standards set for women in the time the book was written and these inconsistencies threaten to undermine his work. An anonymous student poses an important question on this issue: “When writing a dystopia, how far removed should the subject matter be from one’s perceived reality?” This is a fair point, as there is only so much that could be imagined for a completely new world. But why is it that Huxley predicted so much for a future world, but ignored (presumably unknowingly) the misogyny and inequality in it? I can only assume the answer to this is due to the standards of the society of the book’s time. The idea that men were of greater importance was so drilled into people’s minds that Huxley had written this book without realising how biased he was. This can also explain why I have not found any critical essays from an earlier time period on gender inequality in Brave New World. Considering how the three articles I have studied align well with my hypothesis, I can safely conclude that I have made a plausible statement; that Brave New World reflects the gender bias of its time. The critics are both male and female, showing that irrespective of gender there is still a clear gender bias – it does not take a passionate feminist to point out the misogyny in Huxley’s work. However, I must point out that the only articles I could find were written around the same time period, all written in and after 1992. This may be because gender inequality has only becoming apparent to our society recently; before there was still so much misogyny in society that people were accustomed to it.